Success Stories

VMware Service Manager provides an enterprise solution for St.George Bank

One of Australia’s largest banks, St.George, uses VMware Service Manager technology as an enterprise application to support a range of critical Service Management functions, including:

• IT service desks (inbound call centers)
• Change management workflows for IT and business processes
• Integration with network monitoring of bank devices, enabling automated monitoring and servicing of ATMs and LAN servers
• Smart routing of transactions to external service providers.

These diverse functions are managed through the single integrated VMware Service Manager application, whose use within the bank has expanded with St.George’s own growth as an organization.

VMware Service Manager/St.George statistics

• 20,000 problem tickets per week logged through VMware Service Manager.
• 140 change requests per week logged through VMware Service Manager.

VMware Service Manager supports:

• 2,000 ATM devices
• 350 applications
• 45,000 merchants (i.e. eftpos/point of sale)
• 70,000 combined users of St.George systems.

St.George company background

Originally a successful building society, St.George achieved full banking status in 1992, and has since continued to grow through mergers with other banks and commercial enterprises to become one of Australia’s largest banks.

These mergers have added substantially to the St.George customer base and reinforced the bank’s financial strength as well as diversifying the financial services it is able to provide.

Employing around 7,700 staff in locations across Australia, St.George offers its customers a comprehensive range of products and services from personal banking through corporate and commercial services.

St.George differentiates itself from its competitors in terms of the quality of service and value offered, reflected in its consistently high levels of customer satisfaction when compared to other major banks.
Business scenario

As a national bank, St.George supports a diverse range of IT and business operations across a geographically dispersed organization.

In addition to its numerous internal applications and systems, the bank has a nationwide network of branches, ATMs and retail point of sale devices, requiring 24-hour monitoring and maintenance.
A fast turnaround of problems is required to keep the network online and ensure minimum disruption to its customers.

VMware’s Service Manager application provides St.George with a means of both managing problems as they occur in its extensive IT infrastructure, and of managing changes to that infrastructure to enable auditing, avoid duplication of effort and ensure best practice change processes.

Business solution

Service Desk / Inbound call center support

Four Service Desks in St.George use VMware Service Manager to provide national support for all procedural and network problems affecting the bank’s branches and their customers, as well as external merchants.

These include errors occurring in the bank’s extensive network of ATMs (Automatic Teller Machines) and retail eftpos (Point Of Sale) systems.

The Service Desks play a critical role in the bank’s ability to provide a quick turnaround of problems affecting customers, as well as comply with government legislation and external service level agreements.

IT Change Management

Comprehensive Change Management processes provide St.George with visibility of all IT changes occurring within the organization, and speed the turnaround of change by automating workflows and approvals.

All Changes in the St.George IT production environment are logged, administered, reported on and approved electronically using VMware Service Manager. These include moving of IT Changes into production, ATM installs, decommissioning and modification, user requests and testing.

The integration of Change Management and Service Desk processes in a single system enables change requests to be generated from, and tracked back to calls originally logged to the Service Desks.

Integration with network monitoring

Of the thousands of problem tickets logged through VMware Service Manager per week, approximately 5,000 are logged automatically, directly from physical devices within the bank.

Initially implemented for ATMs (Automated Teller Machines), St.George has expanded automated logging to the bank’s network of LAN servers.

Automated logging provides immediate notification of errors and alerts, as well as a comprehensive log of all problems or downtime occurring in the bank’s devices.

According to Sonja Strupeit, VMware Service Manager’s Product Manager with St.George provides “an absolute record of when devices fail and why. It gives us a 100% historical record that can be fed back into our problem logging and Change Management”.

Smart routing of transactions to external vendors

VMware Service Manager’s support of Service Management processes in St.George extend beyond the bank to include the automatic routing of problems to external service providers.

Errors and alerts produced by ATMs and LAN Servers are passed to VMware Service Manager, which, depending on the problem type and time of day, automatically forwards the resulting job tickets to either branches or third parties responsible for maintaining the devices.

Once service is restored following maintenance, the device sends a code enabling the automatic closure of the problem ticket.

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VMware Service Manager provides ITIL Service Management and Help Desk solutions including Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Release Management, Service Level Management and Availability Management software. Copyright © 2010 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.